Steve Montador: ‘I think Zee knew what he was doing’

Everybody has an opinion on Zdeno Chara[1]after his hit on Canadiens forward Max Pacioretty[2] Tuesday, and a former teammate weighed in the big blueliner Wednesday.

Steve Montador, who played 13 games for the Bruins in the 2008-09 season after being acquired at the trade deadline, appeared on WGR 550 Sports Radio in Buffalo Wednesday (audio[3]), opening his appearance with fascinating talk about the B’s captain.

Montador, who said he was “pretty scared and pretty shocked” when he saw the hit, went into detail in describing Chara’s character and what he thinks of himself.

“He has this — and I say this in a good way — a complex that he’s the biggest, strongest guy in the league, and for the most part he probably is,” Montador said. “I think that he uses that just because he feels that mentality.

“One thing about Zee that I recall when he and I and Mark Recchi[4] were talking was that he had a lot of respect for Mark. When [Recchi] got traded there, [Chara] was talking to him saying, ‘I remember one game when you came after me and kept hitting me,’ and here’s [Recchi], who at the time would have been 40 years old, and he’s going after Zdeno Chara and kept going and kept going.

“He had a lot of respect for that, because I think he thought, ‘Hey, I’m Zdeno Chara. I’m the biggest guy in the league,’ and Mark Recchi, although he’s a really thick and strong guy — he’s not the tallest guy — here is coming after him, and [Chara] was kind of wondering, ‘What’s this guy, is he on something or whatever? He keeps coming after me.’ The only reason I tell that story is to just give a sense of how he thinks about himself.”

Montador said that he has never found Chara to be “overly dirty,” but said that “he’s certainly somebody that in some instance you don’t want to be going into the corner with.”

He added that he thought Chara would be suspended for one or two games, and was slightly surprised by the league’s ruling to not suspend the 6-foot-9 defenseman. He also noted that he doesn’t completely buy the idea that Chara didn’t know that Pacioretty’s head could have hit the partition on the play.

“It’s easy for me from this side to speculate, but that part of the rink in Montreal, where the benches are, I’d like to think that everybody, unless it’s their first game there on the first shift — they might not be 100 percent aware of it — but having played against Montreal a bunch with Boston and with Buffalo ‘¦ you’re pretty familiar with the ice,” he said.

“I got a sense that Zee meant to hit him in the way that he did, but I don’t think in any way that he wanted the outcome to be the way that it did. The puck had already been chipped past Zee. Maybe just the emotion of that game and from games previous [led to it].

“I think Zee knew what he was doing there, but like I said, in no way would I think that he’d want to hurt him like that.”